DoD proposes Long Range Discrimination Radar (LRDR) be located in Alaska

News

June 01, 2015

WASHINGTON. U.S. Department of Defense officials have proposed to deploy a planned Long Range Discrimination Radar (LRDR) in the state of Alaska, pending completion of required environmental and safety studies. Existing plans call for the radar to begin its defensive operations in 2020.

The new LRDR will serve as a midcourse sensor to enhance target discrimination capability for the U.S. Ballistic Missile Defense System (BMDS) to better address potential countermeasures and increase the capacity of the ground-based midcourse defense (GMD) inventory of interceptors in Alaska as well as in California. The Missile Defense Agency (MDA) is moving forward with the design and development of the radar and also assessing U.S. industry proposals to meet the required technical performance to counter the emerging threat and support future BMDS architecture needs.

Clear Air Force Station, an Air Force Space Command radar station in central Alaska, has been tentatively identified by DoD officials as the preferred location for the LRDR. A siting decision will be completed only after the environmental impact analysis process has been finalized.